Tag: writing

The Only Skull

As you may or may not be aware, George Gordon Byron is one of my favorite poets. And his “Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed From a Skull” is my favorite poem that wasn’t written by a particular friend of mine, Dante, or A.A. Milne. And while it’s not well known, but I am actually a published poet, as I wrote a poem that was published in Bucknell University’s poetry journal when I was studying there.

Of course, as always seems to be the case, the combination of my talents with my iconoclasm not only caused the poem to be accepted for publication, but also caused half the staff to quit in protest after it was published. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

In any event, I put the Byronic poem to restrained nu-metal, took the liberty of changing the two instances of “quaff” to drank/drink since it just didn’t work, put together a chorus that fit the context, used the final verse as a pseudo-chorus, and threw on a lyrical outro. The poem is well worth reading, and if you want to hear the musical version, you can hear The Only Skull on UATV. When I put the album out in the spring, this will definitely be on it.

Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.

I lived, I loved, I drank like thee;
I died, let earth my bones resign:
Fill up thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than thine.

Why not? Life is rapid sped.
Why not? Nothing’s left unsaid.
Why not? Will you rest instead?
Why not come and revel with the dead!

Better to hold the sparkling grape
Than nurse the earthworm’s slimy brood,
And circle in the goblet’s shape
The drink of gods than reptile’s food.

Where once my wit, perchance, hath shown,
In aid of others’ let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
What nobler substitute than wine?

Why not? Life is rapid sped.
Why not? Nothing’s left unsaid.
Why not? Will you rest instead?
Why not come and revel with the dead!

Drink while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Why not—since through life’s little day
Our heads such sad effects produce?
Redeemed from worms and wasting clay,
This chance is theirs to be of use.

Drink while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Now rhyme and revel,
Rhyme and revel,
Why—not rhyme and revel?
Rhyme and revel with the dead!

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The Self-Destruction of Brandon Sanderson

Fandom Pulse has chronicled Brandon Sanderson’s descent into ticket-taking and social justice convergence, but Sanderson has been creating some additional problems for his fiction writing as well, technical problems that no one but a better epic fantasy author is likely to notice.

Re: Brandon needs to be edited more. I assure you, I’m edited more now than I ever have been–so I don’t believe editing isn’t the issue some people are having. Tress and Sunlit, for example, were written not long ago, and are both quite tight as a narrative. Both were edited less than Stormlight 5. Writing speed isn’t the problem either, as the fastest I’ve ever been required to write was during the Gathering Storm / Way of Kings era, and those are books that are generally (by comparison) not talked about the same way as (say) Rhythm of War.

The issue is story scope expansion–Stormlight in particular has a LOT going on. I can see some people wishing for the tighter narratives of the first two books, but there are things I can do with this kind of story I couldn’t do with those. I like a variety, and this IS the story I want to tell here, despite being capable of doing it other ways. Every scene was one I wanted in the book, and sometimes I like to do different things, for different readers. I got the same complaints about the way I did the Bridge Four individual viewpoints in Oathbringer, for example. There were lots of suggestions I cut them during editorial and early reads, and I refused not because there is no validity to these ideas, but because this was the story I legitimately wanted to tell.

This is more than a little ironic, given the way in which Sanderson was brought in to fix a similar problem that the late Robert Jordan had created for himself, and especially in light of how George R. R. Martin has apparently facing the end of his literary career without finishing A Song of Ice and Fire for the very same self-indulgent reason that Sanderson gives for the way in which his readers have perceived a decline in the quality of his books.

The reason that Sanderson gives, story scope expansion, is correct, but it is too general for the average reader or writer to understand the true root of the problem. Now, this is just a surmise, because I have only read two Sanderson novels and part of another, and I regard him as the epitome of boring mediocrity when it comes to epic fantasy. I’d rather read The Sword of Shannara, the most incoherent of Erikson’s Malazan books, or anything by Joel Abercrombie than another chapter of Sanderson’s tedious meandering.

But if any Sanderson fans here would like to check, I am confident that if you count up the number of perspective characters he’s utilizing, you will find that they are increasing from book to book. Just as George Martin did before him, Sanderson has been expanding the scope of the story by introducing new perspective characters and promoting minor characters to perspective characters, and that means he has been getting distracted by tangents taking his focus away from the larger story. By doing so, he is running a very serious risk of not only rendering his story incoherent and unreadable, but impossible to finish in a manner that will be reasonably satisfying to the reader. If anyone would care to count up the number of perspective characters in each book and report them to me via email or on SG, I will update the post with the perspective character count by book. That should tell us how grave the problem is.

UPDATE: It will probably surprise no one here to learn that the diagnosis was correct. An SG reader provided a perspective character count for the Stormlight Archives, in which he bundled a few small group perspectives that appear in the last three books into one for the purposes of comparison. Anyhow, Sanderson has clearly committed the same technical blunder that Martin did in expanding the scope of his story.

  • SA1: 6
  • SA2: 6
  • SA3: 14
  • SA4: 14
  • SA5: 23

This is the sort of thing of which the average novelist or editor isn’t aware, because writing an epic, be it fantasy or science fiction, is a very, very different thing than writing a novel. An epic bears about the same relationship to a novel that a novel does to a short story or a novelette. Indeed, each chapter of A Throne of Bones and A Sea of Skulls, essentially functions as a novelette and many of them could be reasonably published as stand-alones without the average reader noticing it was part of a larger work.

I described the way in which story scope expansion creates the technical problem faced by Martin in a post last year.

Consider the POV breakdown of A Game of Thrones, the first book of ASOIAF. Eight perspective characters, with Ned accounting for 15 chapters and 18.3 percent of the focus. Only Ned was eliminated by the end of the book, so Martin entered the second book of the series with a very manageable seven characters. He adds three characters to reach 10, then two more in the third for 12, however, he only continues the stories of three of those 12 characters as he introduces 10 more in the fourth book. By the end of A Dance with Dragons, Martin had divided up his increasingly out-of-control story amidst 18 perspective characters and entered The Winds of Winter with up to 30(!) potential perspective characters whose stories require at least some degree of resolution!

Dividing 300k words among thirty characters means devoting the equivalent of one novelette to each character’s perspective, while somehow trying to tie them all together in a coherent manner. While it’s theoretically possible, I’ve never seen anyone accomplish anything even close to that degree of literary difficulty. Some readers might find it interesting to know that in addition to predicting Martin’s inability to finish his series, last year I also pointed out that Brandon Sanderson would not be able to fix the technical problem with ASOIAF and bring it to a proper conclusion.

Given that Sanderson has blundered into the same problem that did in Martin’s series, it appears that my observation was correct. And it also tends to confirm my opinion that despite his massive sales success, Sanderson is not in my league as an author of epic fantasy; that may well sound arrogant, but it’s not as if the sample size of works that, while unfinished, exceed the length of The Lord of the Rings, are insufficient for a determinative comparison.

As any look at the forgotten bestsellers of 100 years ago will tell you, the best books are the ones that survive to be read by future generations, not those that sell best in their own day. And as Deng Xiaoping once said of the French Revolution, it’s just too soon for us to tell.

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Always Mid, Now Gay

It turns out Brandon Sanderson wasn’t merely mediocre, it appears he has been a ticket-taker all along:

Brandon Sanderson was what many considered to be the last, best hope for the epic fantasy genre after his Mistborn series and finishing Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time, but in recent years, the Tor Books author has gone woke, and fans say the current The Stormlight Archive novel, Wind and Truth has gone too far.

Many fans complained about a main plotline of a gay romance between two men, promoted in the book as if it is a positive lifestyle instead of the sexual sin that it is. Moreover, it’s noted the scenes are forced and out of place in a medieval fantasy setting where it feels ham-fisted and modern.

Wind and Truth comes after a blog post updating his stance on LGBTQ as Sanderson has gone from a devout Mormon who refused to include such evils in his books, to putting them as background characters in Stormlight Archives to acknowledge they exist, to actively promoting the sinful lifestyles.

Sanderson posted, saying, “My current stance is one of unequivocable support for LGBTQ+ rights. I support gay marriage. I support trans rights, the rights of non-binary people, and I support the rights of trans people to affirm their own identity with love and support. I support anti-discrimination legislation, and have voted consistently along these lines for the last fifteen years. I am marking the posting of this FAQ item, at the encouragement of several of my LGBTQ+ fans, with a sizable donation to the Utah Pride Center and another to The OUT Foundation.”

He continued saying this new stance would influence his books like The Stormlight Archives, saying, “I put LGBTQ+ people into my books, and will continue to do so. Not because I want to fulfill a quota, but because I genuinely believe that it is right for the characters–and is a good and important thing for me to be doing.”

At this point, I suspect it should be abundantly clear who the only modern heir to Tolkien in the epic fantasy genre could possibly be. Especially for any reader who honestly compares Arts of Dark and Light to Mistborn or The Stormlight Archives. It’s very, very unlikely that this will be recognized at any point in the next 30 or so years for obvious reasons, but that’s absolutely fine.

Once it goes into the public domain, it will rapidly surpass all of its copyright-protected inferiors.

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Yeah, It’s Going to Get Worse

And by worse, I mean a LOT worse for Neil Gaiman fans, as in the aftermath of multiple sexual assault accusations being made, non-fans are going back, reading Gaiman’s work, and observing what was always – and I do mean always – obvious in his work:

Many years ago I bought a huge anthology of Gaiman’s stories. I wasn’t familiar with his work and wanted to give this man a chance. The book collected dust for ages until this week. I had no idea about the allegations when I started reading, but the stories disturbed me enough that I got curious about him and googled. Based on the stories I’m reading so far, I can’t say I’m surprised. I know y’all are huge fans over here, but….has no one noticed how strange his approach to writing women and children is????

I just finished Snow Glass Apples, about a 13 year old girl prostitute vampire that get’s happily r***d by a necrophiliac… He’s very clearly a master storyteller, he didn’t have to go there. He could have easily disturbed us without having to resort to the pedo overtones. But he made the choice to go there. He wanted to. He likes the story better this way.

There are traces of this kind of thing in the stories I’ve read so far – the way the troll in Troll Bridge sniffs at the 15 year old girl’s breasts and crotch. Again, the story was good on it’s own. These details add nothing to the story except to be edgy by sexualizing a very young girl.

It’s not simply about what you write, it’s the way you write about it. There are no shortage of people who were severely put off by my approach to the multicultural interactions portrayed in the prologue to A SEAS OF SKULLS. And due to the way I wrote about it, no one is going to conclude that I am pro-beheading, pro-rape, or pro-crucifixion, although they might correctly conclude that I am not enthusiastic about mass migration.

When, like Neil Gaiman, you’re writing about underage teenage girls and putting them in overtly sexual situations on a regular basis, then drawing a bath for your wife’s young nanny and exposing yourself to her, there is an awful lot of very foul-smelling smoke that lends itself to the conclusion there is a extremely nasty fire burning somewhere in the dark.

Tanith Lee wrote a fair amount of dark sexual material. She also wrote about children from time to time. But what she did not do was combine the two. While what one writes tells the reader a lot about the writer, how one writes tells the reader even more and may even provide some hints as to why.

There are rumors that a big story about Gaiman will be published in mid-January. We’ll see, and we probably shouldn’t be surprised by anything that might be alleged. After all, he managed to convince a surprising number of people that he was “a master storyteller” when he has always been more akin to a deejay doing remixes than an original musician.

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In Which I Agree with Larry Correia

Fandom Pulse quotes The International Lord of Hate’s thoughts on the use of AI in writing fiction. Or rather, the lack of utility thereof.

AI can produce a TON of vapid soulless shit, but hey, so can modern Disney! In fact, when the creator doesn’t give a shit about his art, not only does the audience feel it, the audience gets pissed off. So if you want to produce tons of unenthusiastic shit product and roll the dice hoping it somehow sticks and makes a buck, great. But if you actually give a shit about what you’re saying, then just fucking SAY IT.

The Baen Books author isn’t the only superstar to comment on the topic.

Vox Day is an epic fantasy author and AI music advocate despite writing and recording three Billboard Top 40 Club hits with his techno band in the 1990s. He told Fandom Pulse when we asked his thoughts, “The reason AI text is not a threat to authors the way AI music is a threat to musicians and AI art is a threat to artists is that the amount of vision required for a novel, or even a short story, is orders of magnitude beyond that required for a three-minute pop song or a single 1024 x 1024 image. That’s why a few words are a sufficient prompt for the song or the image, but not for even an obviously inferior short story. Unlike the other AI applications, I haven’t found the various text systems to be a useful tool for producing text of an acceptable quality.”

On tonight’s Darkstream – exclusive to UATV – I’m going to provide a sensory demonstration of what I mean by the way that AI is already a potential replacement for musicians and artists, but cannot even begin to replace authors.

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We’re Already There

I don’t fear AI replacing writing. Especially not on this particular grounds:

“The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it’s fundamentally difficult. To write well, you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard,” he said in an essay posted on his website last week.

However, the development of technology has allowed people to outsource writing to AI. There’s no longer a need to actually learn how to write, or hire someone to do it for you, or even plagiarize, the English-American scientist wrote.

“I’m usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won’t be many people who can write,” Graham said.

It’s common for skills to disappear as technologies replace them; after all, “there aren’t many blacksmiths left, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem,” he admitted. But people being unable to write is “bad,” he insisted.

“A world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots,” Graham believes.

We already live in a world that is mostly inhabited by think-nots. Hence MPAI. And there is no reason to fear AI writing, since very few writers produce anything worth reading anyhow. Between Twitter and Facebook, we know that all the erudite theories about “unlocking human potential” were groundless fantasies, since we have conclusive evidence that most people have absolutely nothing to say.

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Exposing the MMC

I’m not surprised that Ron Unz reached much the same conclusion that I did about the Miles Mathis Committee:

The first of my surprises was the sheer volume of his material. I try to be methodical and comprehensive, so I’d originally planned to read his entire corpus of work, but I immediately saw that this was totally impossible unless I was willing to invest many, many months in the project.

His main eponymous website MilesWMathis.com includes an “Update Page” containing links to well over 1,500 of his articles and their updates, of which nearly 1,000 were his new pieces on conspiratorial topics, stretching back to around 2011 or so, with only a small fraction of these being by guest contributors. Spot-checking the word-count on a few of them suggested that they are rarely shorter than 5,000 words and perhaps might average closer to 8,000 words or more. So the total of his conspiratorial writings certainly runs many, many millions of words, with most of those pieces also containing numerous images. He had probably published enough content to fill at least 60 or 70 non-fiction books, certainly an astonishing level of productivity for a single writer.

Indeed, the volume of conspiratorial material on this Mathis website was so enormous that I suspect his aggregate content is far greater than the combined total for every other conspiracy-website on the Internet. Given that huge quantity of writing he even provided a separate archive page listing the 160 conspiratorial articles that he considers his best.

Writing a 5,000 or 10,000 word essay of entirely original text often including copious images and doing that every couple of days or so seems a rather formidable undertaking for a single individual, especially since nearly all of these were apparently based upon extensive Internet research. These essays seem reasonably well written, though usually in his trademark meandering, obfuscating style, and I spotted very few typos, spelling errors, or grammatical mistakes, indicating that they had also been carefully proofed, certainly far more so than the output of a typical website writer.

Furthermore, I soon discovered that he also maintained an entirely separate website called MilesMathis.com, devoted to his mathematical and scientific writing, which includes nearly another 500 articles, supposedly totaling some 7,800 pages of text and perhaps 1.5 million words or more. A little spot-checking suggested that there was only slight overlap with those listed on his main website.

One very odd aspect of his work was that apparently all of the 1,500 or so individual articles on his main website were in the form of PDF files rather than as ordinary HTML pages, and I could think of no other writer nor blogger who followed that approach.

For me, it wasn’t the volume, but rather, the observably different writing styles appearing in the same papers. I personally know and edit two extremely prolific writers, John C. Wright and Chuck Dixon. And there is a fundamental sameness to their writing styles, even across a much wider range of thematic topics, than one sees in the Miles Mathis, JK Rowling, or James Patterson committees. Even books written by a pair of co-writers instead of a single author is usually quite identifiable; for example, if you compare Good Omens to a typical book by either Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman, it’s very easy to not only see that two authors were involved, but to a certain extent, which parts were written by whom.

In the case of the MMC, the painter guy, who has a very good eye for photo fakes, is clearly different than the genealogy guy. The difference is downright jarring when they’re both contributing to the same article. And they’re both different than the history guy, who has a much better grasp on basic history than most writers.

Don’t get me wrong, I genuinely like reading the MMC, regardless of who is running it. The fact is that if you read Miles Mathis, you’ll get far closer to the truth of objective reality than you ever will by reading The New York Times and other news organizations responsible for maintaining the current Narrative. When the mainstream media talks about “misinformation” they are just projecting their own behavior onto others. As the meme has it, “conspiracy theory” is just another word for “sneak preview”.

I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly looking forward to reading the now-inevitable expose about how I am a Swiss intelligence operative descended from a long line of aristocratic British crypto-rabbis who is motivated by pure jealousy of Miles’s luxurious golden ringlets. My connections to Owen Benjamin alone should be sufficient to fill at least two pages of the PDF. Beale/Bâle/Baal. Phoenician Navy confirmed!

DISCUSS ON SG

“Only Tolkien is Better”

A very positive review of A SEA OF SKULLS by a reader well-read in epic fantasy.

This was an absolutely PHENOMENAL book from start to finish! Better than the first in the series! The depth of worldbuilding found in here is rivaled only by Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms, Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. Nobody has yet beaten Tolkien. And in my opinion, nobody ever will. But Day has certainly surpassed Forgotten Realms in depth and has, after this book, surpassed Martin’s work in quality and scope (Even if we’re only considering the first 3 since the last 2 books in ASOIAF are simply nowhere near as good).

To illustrate the caliber of Day’s worldbuilding, I was reading through Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn concurrently, which is praised as having some of the greatest worldbuilding of all time! And while Mistborn is justly praised for its really strong worldbuilding, it’s simply nowhere near as good as the Arts of Dark and Light, which has entire cultures, races, religions, even languages fleshed out. “A Sea of Skulls” operates on an entirely different level of depth and complexity. This comparison, though perhaps unfair given the differences in subgenre, highlights the exceptional quality of Day’s work in this regard…

Bottom line: Objectively, this series is already better than “A Song of Ice and Fire” and it will remain that way assuming it doesn’t deviate in quality in a similar manner as Martin’s series did. It’s better than Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive, better than Erikson’s Malazan, and somehow even better than Abercrombie’s First Law. The only series better than AODAL is Lord of the Rings, and Vox Day WILL NOT beat Tolkien. It’s not going to happen, BUT… if he keeps this up, he might just find himself moving from “pretty good author” to “one of the greats” territory, alongside writers like Mieville, Stephenson, and Weir.

My chief takeaway from this? We’d better do yet another round of proofreading before we print the interiors of the leather editions. Any volunteers who HAVE NOT proofread it already? It’s always amazing how two different proofreaders can each come up with a list of 100 typos, and only about 20 of them are in common.

However, I will assure the reviewer and anyone else who is interested that all of the major threads can and will be wrapped up in A GRAVE OF GODS. When I was contemplating the possibility of five books, I was not counting Summa Elvetica and I wasn’t sure about how big I was going to make the scope of the series. But after seeing how Martin fell apart and hasn’t been able to complete his, I decided to further discipline my focus and keep the primary series to three books.

In related news, we’ve settled on the names for the four German editions, and Summa Elvetica will be an official part of the series. Two of the translations are already completed and will be released sometime this winter.

  1. Die Seelenlosen
  2. Der Knochenthron
  3. Das Schädelmeer
  4. Das Göttergrab

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Terry Pratchett Knew

He didn’t know right away or he wouldn’t have co-written a book with him. But there’s no question that Terry Pratchett figured out who and what Neil Gaiman was by the time he wrote the Introduction to Good Omens, the book they wrote together. And I don’t think it’s an accident that despite the success of the first book, Pratchett never wrote another one with Gaiman in the 25 years that separated the 1990 publication of that book with Pratchett’s death in 2015.

Remember, Pratchett was a wordsmith, and a much better one than average. And since Gaiman’s reputation has always been one of being “a very nice, approachable guy”, Pratchett is clearly implying that he knows Gaiman is not, but is instead “an incredible actor”. Which events have subsquently confirmed to have been the case. Because that’s the only option that could “come as a surprise to many”.

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Mailvox: An Unhappy Reader

I think it is safe to assume that the emailer was very, very far from what Umberto Eco would describe as my ideal reader.

I was waiting for YEARS to read the next piece of the arts of dark and light series just for it to start with a bloody rape scene. A truly dark and horrific scenario with no heroism or morals what so ever. In true George Rape Rape Martin fashion.

It just disgusts me and It ruined the series for me.

Of course this dark stuff was never left out in your series, but this sledgehammer version of it with no real context, in such a lazy fashion with no true fight and such lame plot justification to force a naked rape to happen.

I stopped as soon as I realised what you were doing and I won’t read it anymore. I waited so long in anticipation and was looking forward for the continuation of one of the only epic fantasy stories I was into.

Fuck you Vox

Sometimes readers understand what an author is doing. Sometimes they don’t. Obviously, this reader’s opinion is as valid as that of any other reader and I don’t take any offense at his reaction, but I will point out that he quite clearly did not realize what I was doing there on any level. Nor is it even remotely correct to characterize the ASOS prologue as having been written without context, in a “lazy fashion”, or with “lame plot justification”. To the contrary, it is there for several very good reasons, among which is the stakes involved. It’s the precise opposite of what George RR Martin does.

If you don’t understand that foreign invasions are horrific things, with catastrophic consequences for women and children as well as for the brave soldiers on the front lines, or if you simply prefer your heroic tales to be a bit more delicate and antiseptic, that’s perfectly fine. But then, I’m not the writer for you. Unlike both Tolkien and Martin, I paint with a full palette of colors, and that palette includes black.

I don’t wallow in it, but neither do I shy away from it, as anyone who has read either Midnight’s War or The Last Closet will know.

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